Quote:
Originally Posted by Two Spirit
All of this comes down to one question. Why couldn't they have come here legally in the first place? They willingly broke the law by coming here illegally, and people that have a problem with that are labeled the bad guys because they don't want to reward illegal behavior.
I do think we should make the immigration process a hell of a lot easier to perform legally, but supporting amnesty measures just doesn't seem right, because it's essentially saying, "You came here illegally, but oh well, since you're already here, we'll give you an SS number, driver's license, etc, because if we don't, we'll look like *******s." Imagine if a store clerk held the same attitude towards a burglar that came onto his property.
It's a tough position to be in, wanting to enforce the law while not looking like an ******* doing it.
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As you say, it's super hard to come here legally and lots of people don't have a better option. I don't know why crossing the border to look for a better life is something we should be trying to punish.
Quote:
Originally Posted by William_the_Bloody
You do realize that illegal immigration costs American taxpayers 113 billion largely as a result of paid social services?
The cost for California alone is 25 billion, placing undue & unsustainable strain on the welfare state that was already teetering near bankruptcy. You do realize this?
You do realize that illegal immigration & mass immigration puts a downward pressure on the wages of unskilled labour? (Reducing the wage of native labours 99 to 118 billion per year)
You do realize that once an ethnic voting bloc that continually cites immigration as major issue on how they choose to vote, can determine the outcome of an election, than it becomes extremely hard to control your border policy.
You do realize all of this?
Did you grow up in a comfortable middle class household? Just curious?
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I'll respond to this with actual evidence and not just logic in the morning because I'm super tired right now. I've definitely seen studies that dispute the thing about downward pressure on wages though - I'm pretty sure it basically evens out in the long run - and I'd really appreciate it if you could both cite your sources and explain exactly which social services we're paying $113 billion for, given that undocumented immigrants aren't eligible for most of them.
I'd also dispute that that's necessarily a bad thing - the government
should use social services as a way to help people. You say they're costing taxpayers money, but that isn't really true at the point where no politician is saying, "Well, immigrants need social services, so we're raising taxes." These things aren't really "costing taxpayers money" because the amount any given person pays is the same. Like, yeah, when they're contributing to California's budget problems that is an actual harm, but it's not like there aren't other factors there, and the solution being "Let's design policy that targets some of the worst off people in our society" just doesn't make much sense to me.
As far as this downward pressure on wages goes, a lot of it could be solved just by making it harder for employers to exploit undocumented immigrants - in other words, with more liberal immigration policy that doesn't make it so hard to live as an undocumented immigrant, the stuff you're complaining about will not happen or will at least happen to a much lesser extent. As it is, it's really easy for businesspeople to employ undocumented immigrants and threaten to report them to the authorities if they complain about, among other things, their wages being stolen (there are a bunch of other reasons for the wage stuff you're talking about that can also be solved or mitigated with less stringent policy, but that's the most obvious one). I also think that it is good for people to be employed, no matter the country in which they were born, so if there are immigrants making more money, that at least provides a counterweight to there being American citizens making less.
I'm also really confused by the bolded bit. Yes - in a democracy, when a large bloc of voters want a policy adopted, it is politically useful for a party to try to adopt that policy. So?
My family is probably upper-middle class, keeping in mind that like 90% of Americans describe themselves as middle class. So there's a pretty good basis for whatever ad hominem you're try to set up.
("You do realize..." is pretty unnecessary. You can be a condescending dick without being a condescending dick about it.)